It is known to use a docking station to provide added resources such as hard drives or CD drives for a portable computer. Docking stations, if they are to support a variety of resources such as CD drives and adapter cards, require a complex bus connection. Docking stations to date are customized so a particular docking station is limited to cooperate with a specific computer or family of computers. And, it is typical that docking stations have proprietary, single-purpose connections to the base machine.